Shoppers walk in an exterior area of Westfield Mall next to Olympic Park.

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Many buses, trains and roads are practically deserted, residents say. Restaurants and shops that would normally be bustling at this time of year are quiet, their staff standing by idly while they wait for something to do.

The city's major tourist attractions have seen their business drop by as much as 40%.

"Central London is empty," said Jelena Veretenikova, who works in a private dining club. "Whenever I ask my members if they're going to watch the Olympics, they say, 'Yes, from Italy,' or 'from Paris.' "

Months of apocalyptic warnings appear to have worked a little too well. City officials have campaigned energetically to get Londoners to change their commuting habits, blanketing the city with posters exhorting residents to re-think their travel routines. On buses and tube carriages, a recorded message by Mayor Boris Johnson urging passengers to "get ahead of the Games" has been inescapable.

Thanks to the strategy's success, the dire predictions about jammed subway stations and half-hour waiting times for trains have largely been wrong.

The tube stations that transit officials have designated as "exceptionally busy" almost always aren't, and there have been endless shots in British newspapers of empty roads in a city perpetually choked with traffic.

Derbyshire resident Ian Ferguson, who comes to London twice a week for business, says he thought he'd have to take the tube from the airport to downtown during the Games. But he'd heard the streets were easy going, so he opted to hop in a car Thursday — and found the driving a dream.

"Easier to park, less traffic," he said. "All the people who can are taking holidays. … Everyone's in Amsterdam or Paris."

"London is just so empty right now, it's brilliant," tweeted Tim Sowula, a media relations manager whose bicycle trip to work is taking half the usual time. "Can we have a multimillion-pound scare campaign every month?"

But the hassle-free travel, while good news for Olympic spectators and other visitors, also means that a lot of people who would normally be here have gone missing, among them many ordinary Londoners.

For example, of the 8,500 people who work in banking giant HSBC's Canary Wharf offices, not far from the Olympic Park, roughly 40% are working remotely, working from home or taking time off, the bank says.

"It's nice that people can move around more easily than expected," said Toby Panton, who works in a restaurant in central London. But "in your small squares, your small cafes, there is no buzz, no atmosphere like there usually is."

Business at his restaurant is down by half, he said, leaving the staff "walking around with nothing to do."

Business owners have long worried that the Olympics would damage their bottom line, because history shows that non-Olympic tourists shy away from visiting host cities during Games time, as do business travelers.

VisitBritain, the governmental agency that promotes tourism, conceded as much earlier this year when it predicted that tourism for 2012 could actually be lower than in 2011.

This summer "there are … fewer European tour groups, probably accentuated by the Euro crisis," culture minister Jeremy Hunt said Thursday. "Some tourist groups stay away from an Olympic host city because the logistics are so much harder. On the other hand, we get a lot of new visitors who come to spend money in different ways."

The spending certainly seems different during a walk through the city. The new mall at the gates of the Olympic Park is so thronged with shoppers that it has been declared off-limits on Friday to everyone except ticketholders and Olympic workers.

On the other hand, standard tourist stops are strangely easy to negotiate. There are no lines at high-end grocer Fortnum & Mason or at Hamleys, the world's biggest toy store.

At Ripley's Believe It or Not!, where the line usually stretches around the corner in the summer, no one's buying tickets.

Bookings at Neil Wootton's tour company, Premium Tours, are down 60% over this time last year, he said via e-mail, forcing the company to run a winter schedule until the Games end.

"There is hardly any traffic in London due to the scaremongering tactics of the government's stay-away-if-you-can-help-it approach," Wootton said.